Art at Angola Prison

For those who live out their lives there, Angola is the world. Eighteen thousand acres of land elbow out into the brown current of the Mississippi. The cuts and pine collared bluffs of the Tunica Hills drop abruptly into flat, alluvial farmland. The arsenic green fields of Angola drop further; into batture pits stalked by egrets and spiked, primordial alligators. Then the land rises again into containment levees, spines of the great organism laid out for the struggle between man and society that is Angola. A field upon which the battle between humanity and its origins in the thick, wet clay of nature is joined. Whether we know or care to acknowledge the fact, Angola is a thing written on the earth about ourselves.

North out of Baton Rouge, past the petrochemical plants, past the graceful anachronism of St. Francisville, a road splits off from Highway 61 and heads west towards the river. Twenty-six miles of two-lane blacktop follow a gentle valley through wooded hills. An ancient, gothic brick church stands abandoned among hay bales; wood-framed houses lean into the vegetation and then the traveler is there. Ringlets of razor wire mark the line between southern, rural locality and the state’s only maximum-security prison. And as Louisiana seems like a place compelled to do things differently, so Angola is a different sort of prison.

If you find yourself here and you are not a visitor or a corrections officer then the state has determined that your crime is one that warrants the most severe sort of penalty short of execution. Angola has its share of men waiting to die as punishment for their crimes, but most of the 5,200 inmates will die here just the same. In the main, it will be nature and time that kills them, not judgment or more violence. For those 5,200 souls the prison has 1,400 cells. The rest of the population lives in what the people out here call camps.

Each camp complex has a church, a series of bunkhouses and various outbuildings, all ringed with more glistening wire. Along the wire stand towers—vantage points with 360-degree views down onto the men below. These towers are largely unmanned now, their plate glass reflecting back the curling swath of clouds overhead—the prison seems to run by a less direct form of order. Every society, no matter its population or its nature, requires some degree of consent to exist. The prisoners have, in some measure, consented to their future at Angola. They have consented to work—and work very hard—and they have consented to inhabit a world with order and rules. In exchange they have been returned some modicum of the humanity that once was their birthright, outside of this floating world.

Jeremy Bentham, in his Enlightenment treatise on the nature of prisons Panopticon, supposed the perfect jail could exist without any guards, so long as the prisoners believed that the guards were there and that any violation of a set of rules would be met with stern punishment. Fewer and fewer guards would be needed as the prisoners saw the cause and effect of their situation. They did wrong and they were punished. Bentham reasoned that sane men would cease to do wrong as long as they believed they were being watched from within the mirrored walls of Panopticon. Perhaps this would be the case if prisons were populated by people like Bentham but something inspired by this idea seems to be at work at Angola. Uniformed men with guns are ever present, but the recent history of Angola indicates that some freedom within the walls of the prison pays great returns by way of orderly conduct from the inmates. A peace exists because actions have been rewarded with trust.

At Angola everyone works. It is the simple, functioning axiom around which this most alien of societies revolves. Men till the fields to grow food that feeds them and they plane the coffins that enshroud their dead. It may be a sane reaction to consider this sort of place in philosophical terms. We who are free struggle to understand the terms a place like this operates upon. But it would be dishonesty not to acknowledge the horrible wrongs that put a man in a place like this. To be an inmate here means you have violated some of the most basic tenets of our social contract, to be here means you have raped, or murdered, or otherwise strayed egregiously. To be here means you have broken or destroyed the lives of others. And yet, there these men stand, veterans, fathers, sons amid the daily consequences of their pasts. We are all the products of our individual histories but perhaps only in prison is one so wholly the servant of one’s younger self.

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I came to Angola in the early fall to write a story about art. Every October this unconventional prison performs what may be its most unusual and public act. Every Sunday during that month a 10,000-person stadium on the grounds fills to capacity for the Angola Prison Rodeo. It is billed as the “Wildest Show in the South.” Very few would argue with that. Each weekend men throw themselves into contests with half-wild animals with the sort of willingness and abandon that can only come from a future summed up as, life without parole. But the rodeo is not all rough-sport. Inmates sell food and snow cones, halal barbecue and cotton candy, and on the rodeo grounds they sell the arts and crafts that are the products of their scant free moments.

Public relations officer Gary Young met me at the main gate. He is tall and relaxed and exudes the easy confidence of a man who knows his way and place in the world. We passed a few minutes in his office as he returned emails to the Associated Press and mused on the coming whirlwind of the rodeo. If it had not been for the reinforced doors and lack of windows, the main office building at Angola could be the English department of a small university, lacking only a little of the whimsy you expect to encounter around the desks of professors. A portion of his wall is devoted to VHS tapes of all the coverage that Angola has received: reports from Belgium, Japan and local broadcasts, and a copy of The Farm, the Academy Award nominated documentary about the prison.

Young first takes me to meet Edrick Jenkins. He has been here since 1985 and is serving sixty years. He fashions boxes and picture frames, miniature rocking chairs and crosses from cigarette wrappers. A big box can take a thousand packs and eighty hours to make. This is the art of necessity, the kind of thing that prisoners have been doing for generations to dispel boredom and occupy their time. The one resource prisons have in abundance is time. As resources go, empty cigarette packs seem to run a close second.

Edrick folds each disassembled wrapper, pulls cellophane tight around it, then weaves hundreds of them together with an Escher-like repetition, the geometry graphing out form. When he left Parish prison twenty-six years prior, he brought with him flattened packs of Merit cigarettes. They do not sell these blue-boxed luxuries at Angola and Edrick knew he would need the color to accent his work one day. Here people makes plans for the future so far past the curve of outside life that any eventual day has to seem as much a part of the present as it does a distant event. When time is all you have, you make complex use of it.

Edrick Jenkins seems relaxed and comfortable in a way that the other prisoners I meet do not. When I drive away from Angola that evening he will wave to me from a rocking chair, having finished his day’s work in the prison museum. He will say, “Take care” and it will feel like an invitation to return or the sort of social nicety you grant a passing acquaintance. Later, on the twenty-six miles back to the highway from Angola, I will think about how at ease Jenkins seemed. He has the chance for parole, a rarity out here, and the turning of the world, no matter how distant, seems different to a man that thinks to save cigarette packets for almost three decades. He seems to have comfort because he seems to have hope.

Back inside Gary Young’s van a radio blasts out clipped reports and codes in some private, official language. The air conditioning labors to keep up with the heat even though leaves are starting to fall from the trees. We drive out to Camp F which houses some of the prison’s trustees. These are inmates who, having served ten years without incident, are allowed limited run of the site’s workshops and grounds. These men will spend their lives on Angola but they will do so with a few more privileges, because they have found their way here.

Houston native, Vietnam veteran and inmate at Angola for almost thirty years, Bill Kissinger has found his way turning laminated wood. He produces intricate bowls and vessels with an abstracted Southwestern theme, something like Hopi-Modernism. Here in the visiting room at Camp F he is philosophical about the virtue of art behind bars. He speaks of how he and the other artisans, all from different backgrounds and with different agendas, have come to use art as a means of understanding each other. Disputes are worked out because they share an interest in form or design. Inmates who, without art, would be at odds, protect and respect one another’s creations and opinions.

Abruptly, he starts to talk about a piece that still makes him proud. Hurricane Gustav blew down a lot of trees at Angola and left the prison without outside power for almost two weeks. During all of the disruption the mother of one of the corrections officers had died in Texas and, things being as they were, it was some days before the body was recovered. The family chose cremation and that is when the officer approached Kissinger about making a funeral urn for her ashes. The pair spent the next three days sawing through downed trees and fashioning from bits of blasted oak and pecan a container suitable for the dead. Kissinger said it was one of his proudest moments. Pain and loss blurring the lines between jailor and jailed, humaneness blunting swords into something like plowshares.

The last inmate I spoke with, Daryl Falls, was the most enigmatic. He holds a degree from the Audubon Arts Center in drafting, subscribes to Art News, has sold pieces to Russell Brandt and Harry Connick, Jr., and will spend the rest of his life in jail for a crime I could not bring myself to ask about. He speaks warmly of a grandmother who bought him paints and art books, about his work in a variety of media, his love of Louisiana and his hometown of New Orleans. Falls effuses appreciation for an aesthetic world that will forever be inside of his head, or at best, inside of this jail. Falls is a hard man not to instantly like, but he typifies the reaction one must have when talking to violent criminals. When a person is standing before you, even if that person has done evil things, it is difficult to regard him as irredeemably evil. There is no clear line that, once passed, takes away an individual’s humanity so completely that he can never reclaim it, and there is no contrition so grand that it will ever undo the horrors he has inflicted on others.

Famously, the gates of Auschwitz and Dachau were crowned with the words “Work Will Set You Free,” but these men are not innocents herded into camps. Dante places the lines “Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here” above the gates of hell and maybe these men are simply damned for their sins. But, the phrase that seems to be whispered by the guard towers at the gates of Angola are, “There but for the grace of God go I.”

Men, fathers and sons, guilty of evil, but still with us. In Louisiana, Angola is the machine we have built against the violent tide that eddies beneath the surface of our humanity. But up from that tide come creations of beauty, delicacy, elegance and grace, to remind us what complex creatures are men. We can no more banish the dark tide from the human soul than we can expect the Mississippi to remain within its banks. For those that live out their lives here, Angola is the world. But it is our world, too.